Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Once There Was This Woman on a Bus...

Yesterday I got pretty great, albeit informal, confirmation of the work that I'm doing here. One of my students, Azzaya, comes in fairly fequently to work on the project that I've assigned her class. I gave them a famous person to research and write a small essay on- they picked people from a list of choices I made ranging from Alexander the Great to Elenor Roosevelt. Azzaya happened to get Martin Luther King, Jr., a man she had never heard of before. Yesterday she wrapped up writing her essay and asked me to look it over. One brief glance told me she didn't really understand what she had taken from her sources- phrases like "affirmative action" and "biblical piety and religious liberalism" peppered her pages. So we sat down together and went through her paper, sentece by sentence, and I explaned to her what she had written. We came to the word "segregation" and I tried to tell her what that was, illuminating it in the context of King and the American South. Then she looked at me and goes "Oh! Can I give an example?" My students seem fond of giving their own examples of things I teach them. So "of course!" I said. She then started with "once there was this woman on a bus" and proceeded to tell me the story of Rosa Parks. She had forgotten Park's name and even that I had read her class Park's story from a children's book about a month ago. But the fact that she so excitedly volunteered the story of Rosa Parks and seemed to genuinely feel for Park's struggle was extordinarily touching. She was so proud to tell me something that she knew about the Civil Rights movement and I was proud that she was so invested the story. The students here don't get much mental stimulation in school- the Mongolian education system, harboring leftover ideas from Socialism, is based mostly around memorization enforced by strict decipline- sometimes even corprol punishment. But the fact that I could give a handful of students a window into the life of a seemstress who had the gumptsion to stand up for what she believed in (I made sure the class understood that Parks wasn't 'just tired' like many ignorent people believe, but an activitst who had planned for some time to make a stand that day) was really rewarding, not to mention the fact that Parks had clearly lingered in Azzaya's mind. Even if the only thing I do here is foster a kinship between a strong female hero like Parks and a sweet Mongolian girl like Azzaya, the fact that I could do even that made everything worthwhile.

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Who Am I?

Hey ya'll! Thanks for visiting my blog. I have recently returned to America after living abroad in Mongolia where I was a Peace Corps then Cambodia where I worked with nonprofit organizations. From Western Mongolia to Phnom Penh and back again, I hope my adventures and travels continue to delight and entertain. Hope you enjoy and thanks for reading!

*The views, thoughts and opinions on this blog are purely personal and in no way reflect any position of the United States Peace Corps or the United States government.*